Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday May 20, 2010 @01:41PM
from the differential-fragility dept.

kokoko1 submits this snippet from The Telegraph, which reports that Facebook isn't alone — now YouTube, too, is being censored in Pakistan. "The blocking of YouTube comes a day after a Pakistani court blocked Facebook amid a growing row over a competition on the social networking website to design cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad."Update: 05/20 18:58 GMT by T: According to an anonymous reader, Wikipedia and Flickr are out, too. Update: 05/21 12:11 GMT by KD: And now add Twitter to the blocked list. This post claims that more than 1,000 sites are being blocked in Pakistan.

This is great that people are pushing to force governments to drop their censorship. But it's not going to work, at least, not in the short term. The reason? Pakistan will be able to find at least a few people or companies that will build local versions of social networking sites, search engines, etc. that comply with their censorship requests. It's how capitalism works, only the government is saying "we've made you a captive market if you only play by our rules".

Ultimately censorship will be killed by end to end encryption and onion routing.

I am in Pakistan right now and find the whole situation amusing. Perhaps they should block queries to root name servers as well since ICANN are not blocking the queries to zones that can resolve blasphemous domains. Yeah. That would service the Internet *right*!

Ultimately censorship will be killed by end to end encryption and onion routing.

I'm sure any government that is serious about censorship will eventually also ban encryption, or at least restrict it to only algorithms that they have a back door to. Such a ban is easy to enforce by forcing ISPs to pass only government-whitelisted protocols and nothing else.

You do know that followers of Islam are not supposed to eat any port products right?

Woosh, that was part of the joke. Jews aren't supposed to eat pork either, but go to any buffet in Vegas and try counting all the people eating bacon and wearing yamakas. And Muslims are allowed to eat pork if no other food is available anyway (cite: The Quran 2:173). Technically, Christians are not supposed to eat pork either:

The pig also because it is a splitter of the hoof but there is no cud. It is unclean for you. None of their flesh must you eat and carcass you must not touch. " Deuteronomy 14:8

Fortunately, I'm a Pastafarian [venganza.org], so I can eat wtf I want. And while I won't get 72 virgins, there is a beer volcano and a stripper factory in our heaven.

Sad you got mod'ed down. While I'm not a fan of the idea of killing off Christians (the Romans tried that, and the Christians eventually took over, so you can't "kill" a religion), I do agree there are some issues with "modern" religion. I strongly believe in freedom of religion, but I can't help but think that some time in the future (50 years/500 years/who knows) that mankind is going to say "wtf were we thinking?", and just as we have cast aside Roman and Greek mythology as a religion, I believe the Abrahamic religions (Islam, Judaism and Christianity) will also be set aside.

And to anyone else reading who is Muslim, Christian or Jewish, don't bother replying to debate this. I fully support your right to worship as you please, I simply think you are mistaken, just as you think I am mistaken. It isn't personal, and I'm not an atheist (more of a pan-deist). That's whats great about being Free (as in speech). We can just agree to disagree.

Pakistan has a problem in that they are more of a democracy, and more liberal politically, thus they allow the radicals who are too radical for other countries. For example, if someone named (randomly) "Osama Bin Ladin" called for vast changes in the Saudi Arabian government based on muslim principles, he might find it needful to flee the country. However, in Pakistan that sort of thing is allowed. They've thus become a magnet for radical types.

Saudi Arabia in many ways has a more secular government, but it is a dictatorship. They don't care so much about Mohammad drawings, but do care about criticisms of the state.

Saudi Arabia in many ways has a more secular government, but it is a dictatorship. They don't care so much about Mohammad drawings, but do care about criticisms of the state.

Yes, this is exactly why Saudi Arabia probably has the best kind of government it can have. If they had a democracy, it'd be much worse, because the people are so backwards. The rulers there are much more forward-thinking than the people, so they keep the silliness from going too far.

How far beyond a full-scale implementation of Shari'a law according to the interpretation of the strictest Islamic school (Salafi) can you get? I mean, we're speaking of public beheadings, stonings and amputations here.

Well, when people are willing to load themselves up with explosives and kill people for being anything other than... you know... INFIDELS... then yeah, if the worst we do back is a tad assholish then... so be it.

Yes but is that really a justification? That's the same argument a child uses - "Well he did so and so". I'm guilty of this myself so I'm not above it. But it's not a sound argument.

Have you ever tried arguing like an adult with a two year old?

You can't. All you can do is BE an adult and ignore him. But guess what -- we can't do that with grown ups who are organized enough to sponsor terrorist organizations, armies, nuclear bombs, etc.

But all that said, is insulting for the sake of freedom worth the results? If the results are a culture rift then I say no. If the results are a better world, then yeah go for it.

That part is debatable, but at the same time, does it matter? Since we can't know in advance what the results are, you have to pick a principle and stand by it. Are you going to err on the side of promoting free speech and anti-religion, or err on the sid

And we can't have that, people getting along understanding each other's views and disagreeing in a civil manner.

Um, issuing - and carrying out - death threats is not "disagreeing in a civil manner". If they aren't going to play by the rules of civilized discourse, why should we? At least we won't kill anybody. We'll just mock them [youtube.com].

These radicals think depictions of Muhammad are disallowed out of respect, but in actuality it has to do with the same principles found in Christianity: Do not make idols for worship. Ergo, none of the profits are supposed to be immortalized through depictions. And, wouldn't you think the prophets themselves would care more about human life than a stupid image of themselves -- especially when people are completely misunderstanding the scriptural context.

The funny thing is that "old-timer" Protestants often destroyed or vandalized Catholic paintings and statues precisely for the same reason: They were considered examples of idolatry. Just go to e.g. Malta and see the faceless statues in some of the old churches there.

That happens in Christian churches *now*, never mind "old-timer" Protestants. Look at the Free Presbyterians - wearing a crucifix necklace would be considered idolatry. Do bear in mind that they make Wahabbi Muslims look like the very picture of tolerance and acceptance, though.

Except that this isn't a principle that started when the religion was founded, the whole anti-depiction thing only started about 2 or 3 hundred years ago. The religion itself is older, and has depictions of Muhammed.

How is killing people or even just protesting over a drawing not equating the subject of the drawing to godhood? In other words, these idiots have turned Mohammad into an idol by their actions and words, and so are violating the very law they seek to enforce on others.

In other words, these idiots have turned Mohammad into an idol by their actions and words, and so are violating the very law they seek to enforce on others.

I am not an expert on the Islamic faith, but I rather suspect they turned their backs on Mohammad when they started blowing up women and children.

It all depends on how you interpret the religion, or rather how your religious leaders interpret it, since ordinary people are always asked by religious leaders to take things on "faith". (The degree to which you are asked to take things on faith differs, but this underlies every major religion as far as I can tell).

Faith is code for disconnecting your mind and "believing" what you are told without quesiton. This is why religion - even "moderate" religion - can be so damaging. You surrender your ability to reason about things to people that have their own agendas. Whether you're asked to believe in the son of God saving us from sin, the great prophet Mohammed showing us the way, the wise Buddha teaching us how to be at spiritual peace, or the Xenu and space aliens hardly matters. With it comes instruction on how you must live your life, and what you should do, and the faithful may not question the "true word" of whomever.

Of course, there's no real offence going on - not like the kind of offence we feel when people are killed, buildings burned, or little girl's are genital mutilated, or raped then beaten for being raped or stoned, or any of the other atrocities commited by the "religion of peace". It's feigned offence for the political reason of giving their population something to hate because they're so oppressed that they need something to keep their mind off their poor miserable liv

If only fluff pieces like this could bring attention to the more real issues in Pakistan. Like the recent assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the first and only head of a muslim state. It's unfortunate in the extreme that the country's court has now been more effective and interested in this youtube and facebook ban than it's pursuit of Benazir's killers.

This ban is not the only thing that has been more important to many of Pakistan's leadership either. Since Benazir's widow became president, the entirety of the country's opposition parties, courts and media have given more attention to corruption charges against Benazir's widow than to the pursuit of her killers.

Former dictator Musharraf is a leading suspect as a co-conspirator in her assassination. The latest news from him is his intent to return to Pakistan, at the head of a new political party that will include the PML-Q. The PML-Q is one Pakistan's strongest conservative Islamic parties, and one the ones advocating the strongest for this ban, for charges of corruption against Benazir's widow, and one of the quietest about her assassins still running free.

Well, I guess that's my small part in trying to draw attention from the 'fluff' over this ban to the real problems it is a symptom of.

You don't get it. No one on./ really does. You're looking at this from the point of "those Muslims are trying to tell us what we can say".

If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are. Don't get mad, you don't have to right to tell people what they can say. Well no, you don't but it certainly is offensive and contemptuous.

It's not an analogy. I'm saying this is what it *feels* like for the average Muslim. Note I say average Muslim, not extremist.Educated Muslims will typically shrug these provocations off but they don't make up the majority. This taboo runs deep into the realm of regular working everyday people in the Islamic world. For another tortured analogy consider pissing on an altar in 1920's Sicily and see how popular you are.

Americans more than any other Westerners should realize the political potency of culture wars/traditional symbols and values.

This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of. They shot their wad in Iraq with their murderous overreaching and failed to convince the Muslim masses to rise up. But this can very easily breathe new life into Islamist movements that have been discrediting themselves in the eyes of regular folks.

You're looking at this from the point of "those Muslims are trying to tell us what we can say".

Are you telling me that's not what's happening?

If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face...

What about this concept is so hard for you to get?

Yes, people have the right to do that in the free world. Freedom of speech is worthless unless it also means freedom to say things you disagree with.

Except, of course, they don't have the right to do it right in your face. Which this isn't. No one is forcing you to go to that particular Facebook page out of thousands -- but you are drawing far more attention to it than it deserves by blocking all of Facebook because of this one bit that's offensive.

Don't get mad, you don't have to right to tell people what they can say.

Those are two separate issues.

First, it's entirely up to you whether or not you take offense. Take the "nigger" situation -- you could get angry, or you could feel sorry for the poor troll who has nothing better to do than harass you, or you could ignore them altogether.

Second, there's nothing wrong with taking offense, or telling people what you think they should say. Where it crosses the line is when you start actually preventing them from saying it at all (by censoring an entire network because of a few offensive posts), or when you respond to someone's mere expression with violence, or threats of violence.

I don't see why that is such a hard concept to get. Hate speech is legal, and the best way to deal with it is to counter with calm, rational discourse, or to ignore it altogether and thus deny its power. Death threats are not legal, nor should they be tolerated, and actions like censorship are in an entirely different category.

It's not an analogy. I'm saying this is what it *feels* like for the average Muslim. Note I say average Muslim, not extremist.

Moreover, I'm not sure whether it should feel that way [youtube.com] at all, if you understand your own religion. Think about it: Why did Mohammed forbid depictions of himself? To prevent just what happens every time you follow his name with "Peace Be Upon Him" -- to prevent himself (or any other prophet) from being deified, from being worshiped over Allah. Merely drawing the prophet should be no more blasphemous to you than it would be to draw Jesus Christ, who, as I understand, is also held to be a prophet.

This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of.

No, they do that themselves. Mere expression cannot make you hate unless you allow it to.

I'm not asking you to care, I'm asking you to understand.

Well, I am asking you to care. Watch the DawahFilms video I linked to. Don't just shrug this off, use this as an opportunity to prove us embarrassingly wrong, and to set an example to your brothers and sisters about how Islam truly can be a religion of peace.

Or you can be silent, allowing your louder extremists to speak for you. Or you can actually defend censorship and barbarism. Your choice.

If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are.

Well a lot of people feel the same way about a bunch of medievalists trying to tell cartoonists in free countries what they can and can't draw.

This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of. They shot their wad in Iraq with their murderous overreaching and failed to convince the Muslim masses to rise up. But this can very easily breathe new life into Islamist movements that have been discrediting themselves in the eyes of regular folks.

Yeah, just like at the end of the middle ages - people challenging the Catholic Church's silly rules on what people could and couldn't say prevented the Enlightenment.

Oh wait, that's not what happened at all - people stood up to them and eventually they backed down.

Religions need to be slapped down when they step out of line. Gradually they are abraded until they are powerless. I've got friends in Iran who - unlike you - actually understand what is at stake and are much more keen for this abrading process to be completed. Because then they can live a normal life. I'm sure 90% of "the Arab Street" feels the same way.

Chanting 'nigger nigger nigger nigger' to the face of a black guy would be harassment if he tried to leave but you kept following him acting threateningly.

The part that makes it harassment isn't the nigger part, it's the 'acting threateningly in the face of' part. If I make a song called 'A Ballade for Niggerism' that consist of nothing but racial slurs against black guys, there's nothing you can hold against that unless you're one of the PC pricks.

If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment: that you are black and some is chanting "nigger nigger nigger nigger" in your face, stopping only to pompously congratulate themselves on what champions of freedom they are. Don't get mad, you don't have to right to tell people what they can say. Well no, you don't but it certainly is offensive and contemptuous.

First, let's see if the blacks reading Slashdot will give you death threats over posting a m

You're looking at this from the point of "those Muslims are trying to tell us what we can say.

They are telling us what we can (and can't) say.

Theo van Gogh

Salmon Rushdie

Taslima Nasreen

The Facebook campaign was indeed a "fuck you" to Muslims. It aimed at those wishing to dominate and control the speech and beliefs of others. If I told you that I forbid you from uttering the word "abcxyz" and that if you didn't comply, I'd issue a fatwa demanding your head. You'd tell me that I was trampling on your freedom and not so kindly tell me to fuck off wouldn't you? I'm curious. Did you plea the same case when groups of Muslims were burning foreign flags and effigies? Those were also "fuck you" statements, but instead issued by Muslims to westerners. I'd wager $100 that you didn't.

If you seek to understand the average Muslim perspective though, conduct the following though experiment:

Good intentions, but vastly misleading.

The caricatures in a danish newspaper were meant for a danish and almost entirely (99% or so) non-muslim audience. They were a far call from shouting in someones face. And they still called for murder.

If you're black, and have a problem with someone on the other end of town talking to his brother in his lawn and using the word "nigger", then yeah, feel offended if you want to. If you go out and kill that person, or ask others to kill him, you're a lunatic, plain and si

Such websites would be illegal in Texas, I don't know whether they have or even can shut them down. I see you are claiming that Pakistan's actions are far worse, and I agree that they are. I make the additional point that similar forces are eroding our rights here at home. Our only consolation is that it is much more difficult for them here, but they are gradually changing our laws to treat us just like any other Third World vassals.

I find that a lot of these foreign developing countries that seem to be oppressive and support censorship are usually pretty much just as bad as any developed nation.

I mean, what with Australia airports checking for porn, US Military blocking the Press with the Wikileaks video, Germany and its whole Anti-Nazi thing. Each country has its quirks, we seem so quick to condemn Pakistan for blocking a web site when we don't even have our own house in order.

Each country has its quirks, we seem so quick to condemn Pakistan for blocking a web site when we don't even have our own house in order.

Your relativism only shows that you are either malicious or ignorant. You do realize that the same powers in Pakistan pushing for this religious ban are also the ones failing to pursue the assassins of Benazir Bhutto. Not coincidentally, the first female head of state of any Islamic nation. In fact, in many papers the same crowd of leaders calling for permanent bans of facebook and youtube for religious reasons, are also remarking on Benazir's own guilt in her assassination for placing herself in harms way.

Sorry, but Pakistan's ban of media that offends the religious is a very minor symptom of much deeper, malicious and vile religious intolerance. Actually, you may have heard something of it on the news a few years ago, some of them went by the name of Tali-something or other. But who can be bothered to remember that sort of thing, we've got our own house to worry about and this couldn't possibly effect us.

We don't need to be able to point Pakistan out on a map to know that over 300 women are killed there every year by their own family for having premarital sex or actually wanting to marry someone for love and not by arrangement, or that rape wasn't even recognized as a prosecutable offense there until 2006. But yeah, we're all equal. We in the west are no better just because we have a legal system that doesn't imprison women for adultery or disobeying their husbands.

There are reasonable limits to how far you go with that, though. The harsh reality is that some people, and some groups of people, just aren't ready for the internet. And if you're the kind of person who thinks that the proper response to seeing a pornographic picture is to kill the person(s) who posted and host it--you should not be welcome on the internet of the civilized world. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Because it's got nothing to do with religion anymore. Sure, some may follow the whole crap out of religious hysteria, but the core uses it for what it basically is: Bullying. They noticed that they get attention if they start throwing a tantrum when someone does something they deem "immoral". It's not far from the Christian right in the US. Do you think they really care about Jesus? Bull. They care about the power that comes with bullying. Especially if the other side only wants to live in peace, so they ca

It's still your fault. The politicians are ultimately elected by the people, unless the vote is completely rigged (which there's no evidence of in any western country). If the people are too stupid to vote for better politicians, and keep electing the crappy ones, it's their own fault. Sure, a minority of the people (like you in Aus and me in the USA) might complain, but we're not enough to overcome the hordes of morons who vote. So while it may not be "your" fault individually, it IS "your" fault colle

It is incredible to me that offending a people's faith is seen as a glorious example of free speech. When did that happen?

When is it okay to make fun of the Holocast or deny so many lives lost? When is it okay to keep offending a people when you know that it is something they hold in high esteem?

Yes, that's precisely what freedom of speech really means. Isaac Asimov had an essay, ("Untouchable", in the June 1991 edition of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) where he explains this much better than I could hope (he was referring to the issue of flag burning, but his arguments are universal). Unfortunately this essay hasn't been reprinted, and a quick search couldn't find it on the web, so I'll try to summarize it here.

Basically, Asimov's point was that the most important meaning of freedom of speech is protection of unpopular speech (be it unpopular to the government, to powerful people, or simply to the majority). There is no need to protect popular speech - there are no negative consequences to agreeing with the ones in power. In Soviet Russia, people could agree with Stalin as much as they liked, and as loudly as they felt like. And yet, you can't call this freedom of speech, because any deviation from whatever was approved took you to the gulags.

The whole point of freedom of speech is that the unpopular, the contrary, and yes, the despicable, the disgusting and the hateful speech must be protected. This can, and does cause offense at times, providing great moron-fodder to the likes of Fox News (which is just funny, since the very existence of Fox News relies on this principle). But the principle is so valuable, so useful, and, in the end so productive that it needs to be preserved carefully. Paraphrasing Asimov: he doesn't want the flag to be burned; he likes the flag, and what it stands for. But if there was a law forbidding the burning, the flag wouldn't stand for anything anymore and it wouldn't matter what happened to it.

To return to our discussion: offending a people's faith IS free speech. Making fun of the Holocaust IS free speech. The fact that some people are offended should not be a factor. Where do we stop otherwise? Lots of people are Catholic, or like the Catholic Church. Should the journalists that discovered priests abusing children be jailed (or at least muzzled) for lack of respect to Catholics? Criticising a public figure should be forbidden as well, because it annoys his or her fans and admirers? Heck, lots of people like Santa Claus, shall we make laws forbidding the portrayal or discussion of Santa?

I believe freedom of speech is one of the most impressive founding principles of Western civilisation. While there may be limits (insert fire theater example here), the judgement should almost always err on the side of more freedom, not less.